More Wilbermania

Stoner is giving me a great opportunity to expand on my thoughts in this area and I thank him it. This is my response to his latest response:

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem essentially says is that for a sufficiently complex system there will be postulates that cannot be proved in the context of that system. He put the stake in the heart of the early 20^th century program to develop as quantitative system based on a static handful of axioms that could be used to explain “everything”.

In light of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem I maintain that consistent, but unprovable postulates should be accepted as premises of the system until either more general postulates encompass them (the separate postulates that all humans are warm-blooded and all birds are warm-blooded are encompassed by the single postulate that warm-blooded animals include all birds and mammals) or contradictory evidence is found (I cannot prove that all swans are white but I can accept it as a premise until I see a non-white one). Godel implies that the rate of postulate consolidation will always lag that of new postulate discovery. This means that the set of premises in such a system is always growing. But I regard this process as asymptotically approaching the objective of complete understanding.

I prefer to consider things in the context of Georg Cantor who established to my satisfaction that it is possible to develop rational postulates about the nature of infinity without having to count to infinity. This “theory precedes experiment" approach (philosophically, this corresponds to rationalism before empiricism) is also how much of physics works these days.

Today leading theoreticians develop models of complex physical systems by integrating and extending more mature theories in a manner that remains consistent with the essence of how things are observed to work. Wilber seems to believe that physics is still operating within the Francis Bacon paradigm. But physics has matured to the point where experiments are done to confirm theories, more often than theories are created to explain experiments. The resultant theoretical models form the basis of a framework that explains (or can be extended to explain) novel phenomena. I ultimately used this approach to develop my framework.

How do I know scientific, materialistic rationalism is the one path of truth? I hope I’ve been clear that I accept that there are multiple paths to the truth, including the spiritual epistemologies. I would ask why Wilber insists that scientific, materialistic rationalism is not a path to the truth? Just to be clear, I do not regard myself as a scientific, materialist but I let their methods inform my approach.

How do I prove my framework according to scientific materialistic rationalist criteria? Rationalism isn’t about proving things, it is about explaining things without requiring untenable leaps of faith. The key to meeting this requirement is the axioms of the framework. If a rational observer perceives these axioms to be irrational, she is free to reject the system upon which they are based. This is where subjectivity threatens to derail rationalism. But this subjectivity is ultimately overcome by consensus building over time. Yes, in the short run this manifests as the academic ‘Good Ole Boy’ network from which Wilber is largely being excluded. But over the long haul, the pull of truth inclines things towards a more impartial outcome.

The academic acceptance problem of spiritual epistemologies in general is based on the fact that they admit to their irrationality up front (be they pre-rational or trans-rational). This is where I find Wilber’s attempts at rationality to be inauthentic. He seems to appreciate that he risks consignment to the personal enlightenment ghetto if he leads with his irrationality and so he puts up a rational smoke screen of citations and jargoning in an effort to get rationalists to take him seriously.

But Wilber cannot hide the irrational core of his system: the ineffable Spirit. This ineffability ultimately leads to the Principle of Explosion, which essentially states that anything is possible once you accept a contradiction. Spirit is the ultimate contradiction. The Principle of Explosion and the Law of Non-contradiction (i.e., a postulate cannot be both true and false at the same time) are lines that few rationalists are willing to cross. I chose to plow right through them and came back with something that is both completely rational and largely consistent with the core principles of spirituality.

There is a petulance to Wilber’s rejection of quantitative rationalism that seems a bit childish to me (there is no denying that ‘flatlander’ is generally used as a pejorative). Did Lisa Randall turn him down for a date or Gregory Chaitin kick sand in his face or what? He is lumping all quantitative rationalists into a derogatory category and yet he insists that people acknowledge the difference between contemporary pre-rational (“New Age”) and trans-rational (“Integral”) non-rationalists. Sure there are know-it-all quantitative thinkers who believe everything can be explained by numbers. But the vanguard of quantitative thought (and rational thought in general) is comprised of many individuals who simply regard the boundary of what we can know as flexible.

Physics has been leaking out of Wilber’s UR quadrant (whose core of atoms and presumably sub-atomic particles, it pretty much owns) into the core of his LR through its increasing integration with cosmology (which owns this quadrant’s core of galaxies, stars and planets). This indicates why the work of physicists and mathematicians should not be discounted in the search for the ultimate truth. Who knows, they may actually find the universe in a grain of sand :-).

More on What is Ken Wilber Selling

A friend whose opinion I respect posted a reply to my first Ken Wilber essay. As my reply to his reply approached the 500 word mark, I decided to make it a follow-up to what I said earlier:

John,

Thanks for your insightful commentary. I have no problem with anything you said. My issue with Ken Wilber is that he won’t just stay in the mystical domain you describe. Instead he keeps trying to surround the essence of what you’ve stated with the trappings of rationalism while claiming to be trans-rational.

Wilber has a tendency to cite a numerous scientific and philosophical rationalists and use a lot of their jargon in making his case. I interpret this to be a cosmetic attempt to inject some rational rigor to his essentially mystical message. I imagine that if he only cited ancient and modern Dharmic, Daoic and Abrahamic spiritualists he would most likely be (even more) marginalized to the personal enlightenment ghetto. Wilber obviously wants to be taken seriously in academic circles beyond that ghetto and so he cites sources from more upscale scholastic neighborhoods. He justifies this by claiming that he is simply trying to integrate Eastern and Western thought on this subject.

I don’t buy that claim because I do not accept Wilber’s basic premise that the fundamental nature of reality is trans-rational. The fact that neither Wilber nor any of his mystical sources know of a rational perspective that explains the fundamental nature of reality does not mean that such a perspective does not exist. Wilber doesn’t seem to realize that saying you cannot find the words to explain something does not necessarily mean that there are no such words.

Unlikely as it sounds, I actually have found a rational insight into the fundamental nature of reality. I was reading Wilber’s book (ironically, you initially brought him to my attention way back when) in a continuing effort to vet my framework. Not only does it agree with a significant portion of what Wilber says, I can go him one better by rationally explaining why things are the way he characterizes them to be (rationality is a requirement that the Lila explanation simply does not meet).

In reading Wilber through the lens of my framework it is obvious to me that there is minimal rational cohesion to what he is putting forth, despite all of his pseudo-rational jargoning. He provides an interpretation of what is out there (his AQAL structure) but no system of basic premises and subsequent arguments that explain why (Rationalism 101). If he could either drop the rational pretense or add some truly rigorous rationality to his framework he would seem more authentic to me.

This is not to say that I don’t buy his trans-rational approach; I merely insist that it does not represent the only path to understanding. It is unfortunate that he generally dismisses physicists, mathematicians and other quantitative rationalists as irrelevant, materialist flatlanders (BTW, would you explain to me why the low end of the Upper Right quadrant of AQAL ends at atoms? Decades ago the Standard Model jury came back with guilty verdicts on the existence of more fundamental electrons, protons, neutrons, quarks, etc.). These disciplines have come a long way since his spiritual sources originally concluded that rational answers are impossible. It was by extrapolating from these fields of study that I found my rational answers. If Wilber is truly being “integral” he should look more deeply into these quantitative fields. What he learns might surprise him.

What is Ken Wilber Selling?

I just finished reading ‘The Simple Feeling of Being’, a 2004 compilation of Ken Wilber's works assembled by a group of his disciples. As a not especially spiritual person, I was surprised at how much he said that I could agree with once I translated certain key terms from his terminology to mine. There is nonetheless a huge gulf separating our points of view. The basis of this chasm is that Wilber is a mystic while I am a rationalist.

In my world view a mystic is someone whose metaphysical belief structure is based on an ineffable absolute whose impenetrable nature undermines our capacity to rationally understand reality. By contrast, I regard a rationalist as someone who believes it is possible to answer the primal metaphysical questions regarding our origin, purpose and ultimate destiny, by extrapolating information from the world around us.

My real problem with Ken Wilber is that he is a mystic in rationalist’s clothing. Wilber claims that his beliefs are supported by empirical evidence gleaned from the world around us, thus implying that the former can somehow be derived from the latter. But it is obvious to me that he actually starts out with pre-existing mystic beliefs and simply cherry picks the rational positions that support it.

In reading through Wilber’s works, it becomes evident that he does not actually explain the system he is describing. From his expositions it is obvious that all roads lead to the ineffable entity that he refers to as Spirit, Kosmos, One Taste and other mystical appellations. To rationally apprehend Wilber’s system you must understand this absolute entity. But every time Wilber traverses an expository sequence (filled with incessant jargoning and non-stop scholastic and spiritual name-dropping), he always comes back to Spirit. At this point he invariably ceases any effort at explaining and starts describing things in poetically paradoxical terms.

The poetic paradox ploy is a common dodge used by mystics to convince audiences that the ultimate answers they seek are incredibly beautiful (hence the poetry) but rationally impenetrable (thus the paradox). This maneuver represents a classic bait-and-switch scheme. After leading the reader to the precipice with “rational” insights, when it is time for the payoff, we are told that we have to abandon rationality to go beyond this point. As an individual who has found my own rational answers to the ultimate questions, I find this gambit to be somewhat disingenuous.

There are only two possible explanations for why Wilber would do such a thing. One is that he does not know the rational answers underlying the world around us and the other is that he does. I would prefer to believe that he is simply ignorant. Since he consistently insists that there are no rational answers to the ultimate questions, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and conclude that he believes he is selling used cars as new (age old answers dressed up in contemporary terminology) and not snake oil (discredited superstitions) to cancer patients (angst-ridden truth seekers).

Bear in mind that while I have obvious problems with Wilber’s approach, on an essential level I agree with a good deal of what he as to say in the realm of metaphysics. The fact that his mystic interpretation of reality has much in common with my rational one indicates to me that underlying all of his grandiose claims, there is valid knowledge in his source frameworks. I point beyond him to his sources because there is nothing at the core of his system that a Hindu guru or Buddhist lama from millennia ago would have trouble understanding. Wilber seems to be simply going through the various sciences and philosophies of the mind and “integrating” positions that are consistent with ancient Dharmic, Daoic and Abrahamic beliefs. The convergence I see between Wilber’s interpretations of these beliefs and my rational framework reinforces for me that there is indeed something fundamentally valid in these venerable frameworks.